American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Historian Michael McGerr wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education that, during the past two hundred years, American corporations failed to “remake” either workers or culture. The exceptional nature of the United States may be ”the persisting sense of human agency” rather than the power of corporations, he said, adding, ”We need to explain why.”’ As the end of the twentieth century approaches, Native American societies remain isolates at the periphery of the more powerful, statebound social and economic entities. Their existence at the margins is arguably self-imposed and maintained in part as one act of resistance against complete assimilation. Embedded within these acts of resistance, however, are threads of change spun from the frayed edges of cultural contact. This essay addresses such contact between nineteenth-century people of the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico and the mechanized embodiment of United States westward expansion, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad. The investigation narrowly focuses on the processes by which the Laguna participants played out the results of that railroad contact later, in Richmond, California, a setting far removed from their home pueblo. The central theme considered here is cultural persistence and the maintenance of tribal being in an urban labor camp, and the consequent effect on identity.